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Subaru WRX STI takes on the world’s oldest bobsled run

Bent but not broken, both driver Mark Higgins and the car survive

March 20, 2017

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I’m standing on the deck of the Dracula Club, looking out over a massive, lake-filled valley covered in snow and ice. The temperature hovers right below freezing, but the sun bears down on the crystalline trees.

“Three, two, one. Action!” Jeremy Hart, the owner of Inc Content watches as his director counts down from below. On his mark, a bright blue Subaru WRX STI hits the rev limiter and shoots forward, slipping and sliding a few feet down a bobsled chute and skidding to a halt before a precipitous fall in the track. A few moments later, Subaru’s record-setting rally driver, Mark Higgins, throws the car into reverse and backs up to the starting point once again. After a few more adjustments, the car shoots forward again and again as the sun climbs higher in the sky. Higgins does brake stands, inching closer to the camera crew positioned directly in front of the car.

Welcome to a project like none other: the Subaru Bobsleigh Run in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

Here at the top of the St. Moritz-Celerina Bobsleigh Run (it’s called bobsleighing in Europe, not bobsledding), the oldest in the world, Subaru has decided to stage its greatest stunt yet: Send Mark Higgins and his trusty TT record-holding Subaru WRX STI down 1,500 meters of the bobsled track. It’s not so much the ice driving that has the team worried. Instead, the team is worried about turn six, also called the Horseshoe. It’s a 220-degree, 2.5-g turn that goes from horizontal to nearly vertical in just under 100 feet. Higgins will need to shoot through at an estimated 45 to 55 mph to get up on the wall and safely out of the turn. It’s something the team can't rehearse -- three consecutive days of warm weather turned the hand-built ice track to soft serve. It’s a turn that clearly worries Higgins.

“It’s not something that we can practice. The ice is too soft, and we risk damaging the track on the first run through,” Higgins said at dinner. “It’s not like anything I’ve done before.”

It’s not Subaru’s first stunt like this, either. Back in 2014, Subaru brought Higgins and a Subaru WRX STI to the Isle of Man TT course. Since then, the car has languished in Subaru’s museum in New Jersey -- until Jeremy Hart came along. In November at the LA Auto Show, Jeremy approached Subaru with this crazy idea. Hart is no stranger to crazy ideas. He was the man behind the Jaguar high-wire drive across the Thames and the Formula E ice-cap drive. He knew Mark Higgins, and Mark had connections at Subaru. If any team could pull off such a crazy idea, Hart and Higgins could. Higgins, after all, is James Bond -- He's the stunt driver behind the wheel of the Aston Martin in the recent Bond movies. A few months after Hart floated the idea, the TT STI was shipped off to the U.K. and into the incredibly capable hands of Prodrive to make the necessary additions to keep Mark safe should the Horseshoe go terribly wrong.

At first, the guys at Prodrive were skeptical. According to Richard Thompson, senior rally engineer at Prodrive, they had to mull it a bit before giving their support. Upgrades to the car included pulling all the glass out and replacing it with Perspex, just in case they needed to extricate Higgins from a wreck. They swapped rally tires for 8 mm Tungsten-tipped studded snow tires. They made extensive changes to the suspension to accommodate for uneven hand-formed ice and handle the increased gs the car would face in the Horseshoe. Prodrive also gave the STI better brakes, a dry battery, nylon bumpers welded to the edges of the car, and steel reinforcements under the body to prevent it from collapsing should it bounce into the ice walls. The STI also got a fuel cell in place of the gas tank. The team didn’t want to run the risk of fire if the stunt went wrong. The STI already had a roll cage, HANS device, FIA wing seat and side nets from its days at the TT. Prodrive also had to remove the sideview mirrors to get the car to fit down the frozen track. The work took just a few weeks, and the STI was ready by early January.

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The ice track posed a different challenge. Typically just a couple of meters wide, it wasn’t made for cars. The team had to bring in a group of Italian artisans, who created the track at the beginning of the season in November, to modify it. The track is essentially the world’s largest ice sculpture, and it changes slightly each year. Using pickaxes, shovels and spray bottles, they widened the track to 6 feet to accommodate Mark’s STI all the way to turn six. Past the Horseshoe is a narrow bridge that simply couldn’t handle the car.

The St. Moritz-Celerina track starts at 6,076 feet above sea level at the famed Dracula Club. According to Ian Richardson, bobsled adviser for the Subaru project (his brother won bronze in the bobsled at the Nagano Olympics in Japan) the club is so named because, legend has it, a group of people decided to slide down the run in a coffin, after a night of drinking. They had a buddy climb in, then closed the coffin and sent him on his way down the run. In their stupor, they forgot about him at the bottom of the mountain and he froze to death inside the coffin. That sentiment wasn’t lost on the team in charge of managing the safety and logistics of the event. Safety crews, emergency vehicles and an incredibly skilled tow-truck driver were all on hand to deal with anything that happened during Higgins’ run.

The track is mostly ice, and in some places, it's backed by wooden forms. The only place where it’s backed by cement is the Horseshoe. Bobsledding as a sport began at that very spot back in the 1890s when a few moderately inebriated British military men decided to slide down the mountain on a roughly welded sled. In 1904, the run became the first official bobsled run in the world. Since then, it’s played host to the world championships and the Olympics, but this is its first time for a Subaru sled.

“It used to be the fastest track in the world,” Richardson said. “Top speed is around 150 kilometers per hour. You can literally hear the track vibrate under you when you go down it.” He would know, too -- He was the adviser for the shoot and a bobsledder himself.

With temperatures warming by 20 degrees the next day, the team worried that they might not get a chance to do the entire run. By 9 a.m. Sunday, it was a balmy 40 degrees at the Horseshoe. The team had just run turn four, known as Sunny because it’s the sunniest part of the track. Just after turn five, a straight leads into the towering Horseshoe. It runs right along the edge of the road, which is traipsed by local buses shuttling skiers and workers to and from the base of the ski slopes, the tony eateries and the hotels in St. Moritz. We watched as the film crew prepped shots and got ready to run that section of the track before heading into the hairy Horseshoe turn.

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On the first run, the STI became unsettled in its icy cradle and burst through an ice wall after ricocheting off the opposite side of the track. A 6-foot stretch of wall collapsed onto the road, nearly taking the event photographer with it. The collapse happened right before a stretch of Armco that borders the road. Had the car gone out of that hole, Higgins and his STI would have ended up in the Armco. It was an incredibly narrow miss that made for an amazing photo.

The collapse unnerved Higgins. While the video crew took a break, we caught up with him as he warmed up with some coffee and prepared to take on the Horseshoe.

“I literally just told them to take the pads out of the seat for that section because I didn’t think I needed them,” he said. “Turns out I should have had them leave them in. I got seriously rattled.”

The car was a little worse for wear. It was moderately banged up, but the bumpers that Prodrive had installed along the side rear and front of the STI held and the frame supports kept the car intact. A few small plastic bits littered the track as the Italian ice-track workers shoveled the soft ice off the road. The collapsed wall, however, meant that part of the track couldn’t be run a second time. The question was whether or not there was enough runway to get the STI up to speed and get it safely through the Horseshoe.

“We’re doing this all on theoretical principles,” Hart told me. “Not being able to run the Horseshoe means that we’re kind of betting on some unknowns.” Despite that, he was confident in Higgins’ ability to get through the turn and land shiny side up. If anyone could thread an icy needle, it was Higgins.

While the crew prepared to shoot the first Horseshoe run, positioning cameras and getting settled, Higgins climbed into the ice tube and visualized his line. Fluorescent marks in the ice wall were the only indications Higgins had of where to turn in and where to exit. His anxiety was palpable. At one point, he rubbed his forehead with his hand and shook his head. His job was to pilot a speeding missile from vertical to horizontal, through a 6-foot gap, on ice. We expected carnage.

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The team was ready to shoot, and Higgins headed back to the collapsed wall to strap in. Silence fell as the crew and spectators held their collective breath. Once again, Hart’s director counted down, and Higgins hit the gas. He entered the turn with enough speed to get high on the wall. At one point in the turn, the support beam scraped along the edge of the ice wall, throwing a spray of snow over the top of the turn. At the exit, despite Higgins’ precise driving, the passenger side wheels ran along the top of the downhill ice wall and the car nearly broke through, threatening to tumble down the mountainside through a group of trees. Once Higgins got all four wheels back on the ground, the small gathering of crew and observers burst into cheers. It was an incredible feat to witness.

At the bottom of the hill, just before the bridge, the Prodrive guys gathered to look over the car and make sure it was still safe to try for a second run, this time back up the hill through the Horseshoe turn. Higgins seemed tremendously relieved despite the severely dented front driver’s side corner and the trail of plastic pieces he’d just left behind on the track, and he assured the crew that he could handle the return trip. The Prodrive guys had to pry the front bumper away from the wheel to get it to freely turn again before handing the car over to the tow-truck driver.

Richardson and the Prodrive guys wanted Higgins to take it easy back up the hill. The downhill side of the ice track had endured quite a beating the first time around and it had thinned. Higgins, always the pro, though a bit giddy from the rush of the first run, assured them he’d be fine and he could take it quickly. Once the car was in working order again, the incredible tow-truck operator turned it around on the track for second go up the hill.

Once more, Higgins strapped in. Once more, the director counted down. This time, Higgins went through the Horseshoe at a more sedate speed, avoiding the thinned wall but still scraping the wall of the Horseshoe with the frame and throwing spray everywhere. It was an effusive flourish of a successful run at something that seemed nearly impossible.

Later, over a dinner of fragrant cheese fondue laced with Champagne and venison steaks, Higgins was cheerful.

“It’s the only time I’ve been able to run a car, bang it up pretty good and not get yelled at for it,” Higgins said, during a toast. “I wouldn’t have done it in any other car, with any other team.”